


marrowmix

by cassandralied



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BACK ON MY BULLSHIT, Flesh-typical nastiness, Kidnapping, M/M, Non-Consensual Body Modification, This is so fucking self-indulgent, ft jared's schoolboy crush, general squelchiness of human organs, sebastian didn't die at the end of his statement because uh i said so, what's a canon timeline?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:01:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23210647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassandralied/pseuds/cassandralied
Summary: And here he is now, with Sebastian dumped out of a bag at his feet, and everything is suddenly, perfectly right.--Local Bone Man Kidnaps Crush, Has Feelings. More at 10.
Relationships: Jared Hopworth/Sebastian Adekoya
Comments: 30
Kudos: 99





	1. Bones to Pick

**Author's Note:**

> I do not consent for this story to be posted on any third-party apps or anywhere except for Archive of Our Own.

He had to promise them extra body parts in exchange, but it was worth it. Beside, Jared _likes_ sculpting, and it doesn’t really make a difference to him whether they’re screaming out of fear or delight. It all feels the same under his fingers.

And here he is now, with _Sebastian_ dumped out of a bag at his feet, and everything is suddenly, perfectly right.

Jared doesn’t need his powers to see all the different ways he could fix his childhood chum, if he were so generously inclined.But before he can decide whether he’d rather turn Sebastian into something beautiful or something grotesque (the line between is so _thin_ these days!) his best friend’s eyelids flutter and he mumbles something through a broken jaw.

Jared tries to frown at the damage done, but he’s pretty sure he’s smiling, nostalgia getting the best of him again. Seb’s always been so _delicate_.

“Hold still,” Jared rumbles, and he sees the minute the realization sparks in Sebastian’s eyes of how utterly _fucked_ he is, and that’s its own kind of satisfying. The skinny boy (oh, but he’s been to uni, hasn’t he, so he’s a _man_ now) flinches away from Jared’s hand and then winces at the pain of moving. Jared crouches, making shushing noises that seem to scare more than calm his friend(? prey?) but he doesn’t much care. Whether or not Seb’s little _brain_ is willing, his flesh is, and Jared makes sure to be extra gentle when he slips his fingers in and realigns the bone of his jaw. So _pretty_ , those bones. Like everything else about him. He sort of wants to steal the jawbone, put it in his own face for safekeeping or polish it until it gleamed and use it as a paperweight, but he won’t.

“All done,” he murmurs, wiping his hands off on his smock, and that earns another whimper. Sebastian doesn’t seem to realize he can talk now, so Jared pokes him, and that’s successful in emitting a startled, “—th’fuck?”

He sees the reflection of his toothy smile in Sebastian’s shiny brown eyes —never been his favorite organ, but he likes them like he likes everything about Sebastian Adekoya.

“Say thanks, Adekoya,” Jared’s snarl is mostly for show, but only _mostly_ , and he senses the fear wafting off of Sebastian even if there’s that stubborn set to his chin that means he’s not going to cry or beg just yet. When he gets no reply, he reaches a hand forward to caress that pretty jaw, not going beneath the skin, not just yet. “ _Say_ _thanks_ , or you won’t be saying anything.”

Sebastian’s skin is hot, flushed, under his touch. Jared doesn’t want to let go.

“Th-thank you.”

Good. “For?”

“For my jaw, even though your goons broke it in the first place,” and there’s his nerd, all stupid anger and misplaced bravado. Jared smirks, and grips the soft, yielding skin of Sebastian’s throat. He can feel the other man’s instinctive swallow as he fights back panic.

“I take it you missed me,” Sebastian manages, dry and choked, and that actually manages to make Jared chuckle.

“Course I did.”

"Now I'm here."

"Yup."

“What now?”

Always so fucking curious. Jared’s never liked curious people. He should have killed Seb as soon as he heard about that _fucking_ statement. But he didn’t, and here they are, sitting on the cold floor in the back of a meat locker staring into each other’s eyes with competing expressions of disbelief. Eventually, Jared shrugs. “Dunno.”

Sebastian’s eyebrows raise. “You don’t _know_?”

“Nope.”

Oh, he has _ideas_. Some of them involve keeping Sebastian alive and sewing him into himself, so Jared can hear his screams wherever he goes. Some of them are fairly straightforward, and they involve sanitary methods of disposal and a few cut-off whimpers. Some of them, and these are the scary ones, involve sleeping in the same bed like they’re boys again. Some of them involve not being a monster, and _those_ are the terrifying ones.

But none of that shows on his face, and if Sebastian can hear the acceleration of Jared’s three hearts, he doesn’t show it.

“You can understand how I might find that concerning,” Sebastian says finally. “That you don’t know what you’re going to do to me and all.”

“Yeah,” Jared replies nonchalantly. He cares about Seb and all, but the dumb kid can suffer a little longer. That’s what he gets for running off to another god, anyway. Jared stands, so Seb does too. “Where are we going?”

“Me,” Jared corrects. He wants a cigarette. Has the fucking lungs for it, doesn't he? “Gym.”

“You’re going to the _gym_?”

Well, it sounds bloody stupid when Sebastian says it like _that_.

“Yup.”

“Where the fuck does that leave me?”

Jared makes a big show of looking around the meat locker, and is rewarded with Sebastian’s _face_ , a combination of furious and absolutely appalled. “Oh, you’re shitting me.”

“Bye,” Jared says, cheerfully, and begins walking towards the door. Sebastian chases after him, naturally (and isn’t that a _treat_ , to have _Sebastian_ chasing for once?) but Jared has very many arms and they put a stop to that right quick.

Jared takes a moment to memorize the angry, scared, _hopeless_ expression on Sebastian’s pretty face before he swings the door shut and hears the lock hiss. Idiot. Like Jared’s going to leave him here.

He went through so much trouble to get him, after all.

Now he just needs to figure out a longer term plan.


	2. Jared Hopworth Did Nothing Wrong (right? right??)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But without three very useful hearts, Sebastian’s lips are blue, and he’s curled into a tiny, shivering ball in the middle of the floor.
> 
> \--  
> Jared takes care of Sebastian. Hey, what are friends for?

He’s forgotten how cold a body can get when left in a meat locker for an extended period of time, but in Jared’s defense, most of the bodies he leaves in meat lockers aren’t _alive_ anyway so it doesn’t matter.

But without three very useful hearts, Sebastian’s lips are blue, and he’s curled into a tiny, shivering ball in the middle of the floor.

Sebastian really always has been a wimp despite the mouth on him. Jared remembers how Sebastian had usually been the one to get them into fights more often than not, and how he’d probably be dead by bully if he didn’t have Jared to back him up. Not that he’d been particularly grateful about it, abandoning Jared for university as soon as possible.

Jared scoops his best friend up with two of his arms, the others mainly focused on rubbing warmth back into the chilled meat.

Sebastian, barely conscious but sensing the warmth radiating off of Jared’s body, snuggles closer into his chest, which is kind of endearing. Like a baby rabbit. One of Jared’s hands comes up to pet Sebastian’s head, and it’s nice, so he keeps doing it.

Out of the meat locker, he sets Sebastian down on a little cot by the oven and covers him with a blanket. Sebastian keeps twitching in his not-quite-asleep state, and Jared wonders what he’d have to reach in and take out for him to stop doing that. It’s... _distracting_. He’s not concerned or anything.

He makes soup while he waits for Seb to wake up; Jared’s always been a decent cook having to take care of his mum and all, and it helps having lots of extra bones for broth.

“Where am I?” comes from the mass of blankets by the oven, and Jared smiles and ladles some soup into a little ceramic mug.

Crouching lowly by the cot, he still towers over his old friend. He holds out a spoonful of soup. “Open up.”

Recognition is starting to dawn on that pretty face, and then anger. “You kept me in a _meat locker_.”

“Open,” Jared repeats. Sebastian looks like he wants to smack the soup out of Jared’s hand. “I could have got hypothermia!”

“Nah. Was a quick workout.”

Sebastian’s mouth hangs open, and Jared takes the opportunity to feed him. He watches the way Seb’s lips close around the spoon and the way his throat bobs when he swallows and it makes Jared feel — _something_.

“You make that?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh.” Sebastian looks him up and down, eyes the spoon. “Is that, you know. _Made_ of you?”

“Nope.” It’s true, even. The soup’s made out of somebody he picked up on his way back from the gym, with very nice bones and some usable meat.

“It’s good,” his human concedes, sounding a bit reluctant. He doesn’t demand to feed himself or anything. Maybe he thinks Jared will put him back in the meat locker if he gets testy. He accepts another few spoonfuls, clutching that blanket tight around himself. His shivering’s stopped. That’s a good sign.

When he’s finished with his soup, Sebastian keeps _looking_ at Jared with a question in his eyes. Jared sighs. “What.”

“What did that book do to you?”

Sebastian and his questions. Jared keeps his answer short. “Taught me some things.”

“Like how to remove bones?”

“Turn ‘em. Yeah.”

“You hurt your mother.”

There’s no point denying it. He shrugs. “Wasn’t the first time.”

Sebastian doesn’t look surprised. He was around during most of Jared’s childhood, after all. And he’s a smart boy, he probably knows shit about _cycles of abuse_ from school.

Jared finds himself telling Sebastian more than he intends to. About the way the book spoke to him, almost singing. About how the first time he hadn’t even meant to hurt his da. About the dreams he has of _rituals_ , cycles of marrow and meat going on forever.

Sebastian listens to all of this, totally rapt, like it’s children’s reading hour at his bloody library. “Are there others like you?”

Jared traces Seb’s cheekbone with one large thumb while he ponders the question. He’s always had nice bones, organized nice and efficient in his slender face. Sebastian looks at him warily, but no longer like Jared’s about to pull the bone out and put it in stew, which is… _nice_.

“Not like me. But there are others.”

At Sebastian’s raised eyebrow, Jared finds himself talking again. About the warnings the meat whispers to him, about cameras and things with eyes. “I figure there’s a few categories, see,” he explains. “There’s the watchers. The hunters, the worms, the swirly bits. The sad ones. And, uh, me.”

That’s how far he’s got, really.

Sebastian looks like he’s having him on. “The worms.”

“Yeah. They bite.”

“Worms don’t have _mouths_.” Of course he would know something like that, fucking nerd, but Jared just shrugs.

“These ones do.”

“Okay, biting worms. What’s a _swirly bit_?”

The swirly bits are hard to describe, and just thinking of them gives Jared a bit of a headache. He stands, switches the empty mug with the spoon in it to his farthest hand so he can deposit it in the sink. “Hope you don’t find out,” he says, and leaves it at that.

“And the —the sad ones?” Sebastian doesn’t particularly look like he wants to know the answer, but he has to ask.

“Yeah, dunno much about those guys,” he admits. He sits on the edge Sebastian’s cot, and it creaks a little but doesn’t break. Most things don’t, if you enforce them with bone. “They just sorta. Stand ‘round. Lookin’ —”

“ _Sad_ ,” his best friend says scathingly.

Good, he’s understanding. “Yup.” Jared wants to reach out and run a hand through Sebastian’s soft hair again, and he’s not in the practice of denying himself, so he does. Sebastian does a full-body shiver at that, but he doesn’t move away, just keeps watching Jared with a catlike wariness in his pretty eyes. A panicked thought races through Jared’s brain, and it’s that if he doesn’t get up now, he might stay here doting on the little nerd forever.

He rises, abrupt. “You want another blanket?”

Sebastian looks startled by the change of subject. “You…have one?” _In this shithole,_ he means. _I’d never stay in an abandoned meat store,_ he means. _Fucking failure_ , he means.

Jared’s muscles tighten, minutely. “N’vermind.” He has to find more bones. He turns towards the door of the shop.

“No, wait.”

Half turns back. Sebastian is sitting up in bed. Jared fancies he could hear his heartbeat, that one singular organ pounding stoically away as though it has no idea the constant danger its stupid owner is playing himself in. “Yeah?”

Sebastian used to chew on a blankie when he was a kid. He has that same look in his eyes now, like he wants blankie back.

“Where are you going?”

“Out,” Jared says shortly.

“Are you going to hurt people?”

“Haven’t hurt you.”

He’s dodging the question. They both know it.

“Where are you going to sleep?”

He shrugs. Sebastian looks the tiniest bit panicked. “Are you —coming back?”

And _that’s_ weird, because he’d think Seb would relish the chance to escape. He’s probably just not up to it yet, being meatlockered and all.

“Yeah,” Jared says shortly. “Don’t stay up.”

He locks the door behind him and pockets the key.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes jared has a kiss the cook apron it just wasn’t mentioned because it’s not relevant to the story


	3. T-Pose with All Your 50+ Arms to Assert Dominance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You do realize that your intimidation makes up the entire backbone —no pun intended —of their two-bit terror organization?”
> 
> \--  
> Jared and Sebastian dispose of a corpse and discuss business matters. #marriedcouplethings

“I’m having company,” Jared announces. They’ve been living together in this little domestic parody for a few days, and it’s just after dinner (microwavable mac and cheese) that he makes this announcement.  
Sebastian stares at him like he’s just made a joke. “You —what?”  
“You’d think of ‘em as lowlifes,” his captor explains generously. “Business partners. Need to discuss a few things. Are you going to be good?”  
More of that incredulous stare.  
“If you’re not good, I’ll have to…”  
“Yeah.” That seems to spark Sebastian’s brain again. “No, I’ll be good. Just don’t… _do that_ again. Please.”  
Jared shrugs. Maybe he’s a little disappointed that Seb hasn’t felt the warm, wet embrace of the Flesh the way that he has, but he doesn’t have the time to be bothered by it.

When Jared meets with the local mafia, he knows he’s not meeting with the heads, the real power. He doesn’t know the names of the two wide-shouldered men in business suits that come the third of every month to discuss terms, and he doesn’t much care. He can tell them apart easily enough. One has osteoporosis.  
“Who’s that, then?” the one with healthy bones asks sharply, nodding to Seb, who lingers in the doorway of the shop’s back room with curious eyes.  
“Nothin’ you need to worry about,” Jared replies easily. “He’s with me.”

“I didn’t know you were in the habit of keeping pets, J,” osteoporosis says with a little laugh, and Jared can practically feel Sebastian bristle and step forward, surely opening his mouth to say something stupid.  
“Just the one,” he says quickly, putting one of his hands on the back of Sebastian’s neck to keep him quiet and pretending he doesn’t notice the scowl his friend sends at him.  
“We’ve another job for you, bone man.” osteoporosis crosses the room, hands Jared a file. He notices the repulsion, the quick way the man steps back, and it makes him smile. Sebastian still looks too exasperated to remember to be scared, and that makes Jared smile too.

“They’re cheating you,” Seb says shortly. Jared looks up from the corpse he’s disposing of. It twitches. Not a corpse, then.

“This is my workroom,” Jared replies. He considers, then twists the nostrils shut. Cartilage is a little harder to bend than bone, but it’s worth it for the novelty of watching someone try to breathe without any usable holes. For his part, he breathes in the living corpse’s panic, lets it seep and suffuse into every atom of himself, hears the discordant synchronicity of his heartbeats slow in satisfaction.

Releases a breath, and then turns back to Sebastian standing by the doorframe. “Get out.”  
Sebastian’s eyes are fixed on him, not the panicked suffocating of the meat. Full of surprises, his Sebastian is. Maybe uni gave him balls. Or maybe he was always like this, and Jared had just forgotten.  
“This is a _meat locker_ ,” his captive retorts. “I should know, you kept me in it for three hours.”  
“Your watch broke,” Jared says mildly. “You’re just guessing three hours.”  
The corpse manages to heave itself off of Jared’s work table, and clatters to the ground between them, pupils dilating frantically. It’s trying to make screams, but it can’t without a tongue or lips. Or air, for that matter.

“The people you work for,” Seb repeats. He’s clutching one of Jared’s blankets around him, either for warmth or strength, he can’t tell. “How long have you been working for them?”  
Jared answers with a shrug. He glances down at the meat, which is finally dead. Nudges it with a foot to make sure.

“Is that for dinner?” There’s a dark humor in Sebastian’s voice, a morbid levity. Jared snorts. “Nah. Sendin’ a message with this one.”  
“They’re only giving you three percent. I heard them.”  
“Three percent’s fine.” He picks up the corpse from the floor and begins preparing it for delivery. They’d wanted a big, garish bow on it to really scare the shit out of their competitors, and Jared still needs to find a stationary store open this late. He doesn’t have time to argue with Sebastian about money, of all things.

“You do realize that your intimidation makes up the entire backbone —no pun intended —of their two-bit terror organization?”  
Jared pushes the table back, begins walking towards Seb. Seb stands his ground.  
“What d’you suggest, then?”  
“Finish this job, and then negotiate for better terms. If you don’t get it, find a real mob business to be working for. Like whoever’s taken over for Noreiga, or, I don’t know, one of the big hustles in the States. Or _Russia_. Russia’s fabulously corrupt. You have any idea how much damage you could do in Russia? How many customers you could get?”

Jared takes a minute to process all of that.  
Eventually, what he says is, “You figure it’ll be easier to get away during transit, is it?”  
Sebastian scoffs, as if that suggestion is actually offensive somehow. “Maybe I just want to hole up in a library instead of a fucking meat shop. I understand you have a brand to keep up with, but _honestly_ , Jared.”  
Jared hasn’t done a lot of kidnappings, but he’s pretty sure they’re not supposed to get this mouthy. Or this… _invested._  
“We’re done.”  
“Jared, for fuck’s sake —”  
“I’ll think about it, alright? Now shut up and get back in your meat locker, I need to get one of those fucking giant Christmas bows before the shops close. For the corpse.”  
“Are they reimbursing you for _that_ , at the very least?”

He doesn’t end up putting Sebastian back in the meat locker.

Call him a softie, but he remembers the way his friend had shivered, after. Doesn't want to nurse him back to health again, especially if they are travelling soon.

Jared takes a moment to look at him, after he’s turned his mouth inside out so there’s no possible way Seb can scream, and duct-taped his hands and ankles together. The panic wafting off his captive is sweet and buttery, and Jared knows instinctively it could be better, it could be flavored by pain, if he were to just reach forward inside Seb’s rib cage —  
But no. He’s being nice. He’ll even turn Sebastian’s mouth back to normal to hear some more of those _marketing ideas_ after he gets back with his goddamned bow. (not that he’ll tell him that yet, of course. Let him wonder. Jared hasn’t lost all his edge just yet.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dark side of ao3 where is the tma writing discord and how do i get access

**Author's Note:**

> i...hate how into this ship i am.
> 
> thank (or blame) the quarantine for the fact that you will probably be getting more of this.


End file.
